One of the most sophisticated techniques using the digital transformations available to actually get into a depth analysis of your marketing technique and optimise it in the best way possible for better returns.
Marketing as we all know has been one of the most critical and important elements of any business. Marketing is the ladder between the buyer and the seller, but marketing has never been an easy task.
For decades now, big businesses have suffered heavy losses in marketing because there was no core analysis available about which part of the marketing strategy worked in their favour and which didn't.
There were no tools to track back the amount of success a marketing campaign has bought but with the advancement in technology and the rise of the digital era, the problem got narrowed down to solutions.
A highly prioritised solution to keep track of how much have you spent and what the returns associated with that sending is Performance-based advertising.
One of the most sophisticated techniques using the digital transformations available to actually get into a depth analysis of your marketing technique and optimise it in the best way possible for better returns.
What is Performance-based advertising?
It is a marketing technique that is used to achieve specific and measurable financial results in a limited amount of time.
It can be related to any factor or objective like improving lead quality, increasing lead flow, increasing conversion rate, retaining the target audience, gaining loyalty and many other metrics that are important inside any business platform.
Performance marketing enables you to manage all of your channels together with lesser effort and time. Moreover, it allows the user to maximise the returns out of the marketing budget spent.
The main intent of performance-based advertising is to reduce the money that goes in vain and let every penny be worth fulfilling the marketing goals.
Performance advertising is a lot different from brand-based advertising because, in the latter, the marketing is based on the establishment of the brand name which plays the centre of gravity for all marketing related concerns whereas performance-based advertising can be used and applied to a fresh business which has no brand value till now and it will still prove to be effective in this case.
Types of Performance marketing
When you are studying performance marketing in detail, it is essentially important to know that performance marketing comprises several parts that work on different objectives and algorithms.
Here we have mentioned the most popular and massively used types of performance marketing in the list below:
1- Affiliate Marketing
Any type of marketing technique that is affiliated with the advertiser and the deemed payment is made only when the desired goals are met comes under the category of Affiliate Marketing.
Common practices of Affiliate Marketing branch into partnering with coupons, reviews, and incentive sites or it can also include the support from a known influencer, YouTuber or blogger.
2- Native advertising
This is a variant of paid media where the advertisement looks native to the page or website where it is put along. The objective is to promote a brand or a business without making it look like a promotional ad or advertising banner.
Native ads are structured likewise to the platform where they are used. They do not cause hindrance to the user in form of pop up ads, instead, they dynamically fit in to content where the visitor is interested. The most common payment models for native advertising are CPM (pay per impression) and CPC (cost per click).
3- Sponsored Content
It is an amalgamation of native advertising and content marketing. Sponsored content involves including a dedicated post or video on a website that publishes similar content. This is a smart way of promoting your content to a very relatable platform where the audience is assumed to be interested in that content.
People use popular channnels to sponsor their content and hint at the presence of their business which is similar to the theme of that sponsored content.
The use of highly known YouTubers or highly followed influencers is very common in Sponsored content to promote a new business to a larger audience using their fan following or popularity.
The compensation offered to these supporters is often in form of a free product. Other times the payout can be in the form of CPM or CPC.
4- Social Media Marketing
This marketing technique involves the major role of social media networks to gain more traffic and increase visibility. The content showcased on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat is an example of how social media marketing works.
Knowing the fact that there are a huge fraction of people in the contemporary world who are highly active users of social media, it is a very fair idea to promote your product there so as to get the maximum coverage possible.
Development of different ad formats and targeting options, it is now easier for advertisers to work on the marketing strategies while measuring KPIs such as engagement, clickthrough rate (CTR), CCP and ROI.
5- Paid Search Marketing
This is the part of marketing which involves the advertiser paying for clicks to sponsored ads. This mainly happens over search engines like Google or Yahoo. Sometimes, the payment is also dealt with when the ad is being displayed over the search engine every time.
Top 6 Performance marketing platforms
Performance-based marketing is dependent on many tools that actually make the whole system easier. Here are the top 6 tools that will make the analysis smooth and save your time and money
1- Offer 18
It is an award-winning tool for performance marketing. It is a robust and multi-functional tool that can help you with affiliate networks, advertisers and advanced tracking capabilities. You can build your own affiliate network, optimise their campaign and
fruitfully use all the traffic resources to generate ROI using advanced techniques built-in with this tool.
2- Tracker
It is yet another famous and renowned tool in the world of Performance Marketing. Using this it becomes very easy for the advertiser to trace the campaigns and affiliates on a massive scale.
It has unique and useful features like fraud detection, targeting control, traffic optimisation, conversion based pricing and a wide range of other utilities. It is an all in one tool to help you get the upper hand on your performance-based marketing agenda.
3- Cake
It is known for its effectiveness in lead distribution and multi-channel marketing. It allows advertisers and affiliates to get the best analysis of the advertisement in real-time scenarios. Multichannel marketing solution calculates the true cost of customer acquisition across channels against consumers.
4- Tune
One of the top tools for purposes like developing, exploring and creating partner programmers and networks. It helps to widespread your sources and advertising reach.
It is one of the largest platforms with great companies registered as their customers for performance marketing solutions.
It has earned its image over a long time span and has given better results with time and the advancements made in the tool every year.
5- Everflow
It is a tool majorly used for monitoring and evaluating marketing campaigns. It is a tool that comes with multiple metrics that can be analysed with good representation which is easier to understand.
Everflow can help detect the glitches at fault in the advertising areas and hence can improve the overall returns from the next marketing campaign.
6- Scaleo
It is a customer-driven, detail-oriented, creative tool producing admirable outcomes for large advertising campaigns. It has highly been appreciated for the team of experts who have done tremendous work in the field of performance-based advertising.
Difference between Digital Marketing and Performance Marketing
Digital marketing can be referred to as a vast range of marketing techniques which use any form of an online channel whereas, in performance-based advertising, a cost is attached to a certain desired outcome.
Performance marketing is remunerative only when the set conditions have been met. Digital marketing is a much wider term which includes different payment models, and the use of different sources and channels to promote your content through online platforms.
Performance-based marketing has goals that are shorter and can be analysed using some easy to use metrics. Performance-based marketing is driven by a set of goals and is only considered functional when that objective is achieved.
That objective can be associated with any metric like increasing traffic, increasing clicks or conversions, etc.
Benefits and Importance of performance marketing
Now as you have seen the usage and meaning of performance-based marketing, it is easier to understand its importance and benefits. Here is a list of the positives that it enables us with:
1- Track real-time ROI measurements
You can have full access to data which has and hasn't worked in your favour. You can set your goals and be sure that a full analysis of the success and failures will be provided with the help of performance-based marketing.
You can get the details immediately when a user reaches, subscribes or signs up for your product or service. You can easily keep a watch on where the advertising funding is really paying you back and with that analysis, you can narrow your advertising options and focus them where you can generate the maximum ROI.
2- Enhance your KPIs
KPIs are the key performance indicators. It is yet again crucial to know your KPIs and keep making advancements in them with the upcoming needs and new goals. Your KPI can be anything which you consider a crucial part of your business indicator like the customer conversion rate or maybe a percentage of sales from new clients.
With the use of performance marketing, at every step, you will be able to know the indicators and how well they have been performing.
Your KPIs can never always be the same so you can use performance-based marketing to strategise and optimise your KPIs with dedicated goals and positive enhancements to the changing needs of the business.
3- Paying for the desired action
While other marketing techniques charge you for anything and everything, on the other hand, in this marketing technique, you only got to pay when your set goals have been achieved. It is a very conventional approach for fresh startups and smaller companies that cannot allocate a huge budget to marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
So, this is all the basics that you need to know about performance-based advertising. You can use it for your business and craft a perfect marketing strategy which is completely based on goals and implementing them.
With the use of the right techniques and better KPIs, performance-based marketing is guaranteed to give you positive returns.
